Am I the only one who saw TRWTF to be that she has sex in the dispatch room? Aren't there cameras at all? Maybe she got a kick out of it, more power to her I guess. Really put the "F" in WTF.

I believe the joke was that she "slept with" a co-worker (meaning they were both sleeping in the same room), not that they were actually having sex. If they did actually do the deed, I would expect more detailed accounting of the incident, preferably with video.

Just to clarify... the orange button on the terminal server that I stupidly pressed was the internal circuit breaker. I learned that day that generally when a piece of equipment stops working and there's a smoky smell and the breaker pops, the last thing you should do is flip the breaker again. It pops for a very good reason.

A little postscript to add to the last part of the story is that after about 4 days of our heroic dispatchers doing their normal ordinary job while the county drowned around them (and the BATF stomped around looking important), the county bought and passed out "souvenir" t-shirts. On the back was the date of the event and something like "congrats for all of your hard work", followed by a list of all participating agencies. Where did we fall in the list? The last item which read "... and all other participating agencies". So yes, 911 dispatchers are VERY unappreciated even by their own employers. (I was PISSED.)

Just to clarify... the orange button on the terminal server that I stupidly pressed was the internal circuit breaker. I learned that day that generally when a piece of equipment stops working and there's a smoky smell and the breaker pops, the last thing you should do is flip the breaker again. It pops for a very good reason.

A little postscript to add to the last part of the story is that after about 4 days of our heroic dispatchers doing their normal ordinary job while the county drowned around them (and the BATF stomped around looking important), the county bought and passed out "souvenir" t-shirts. On the back was the date of the event and something like "congrats for all of your hard work", followed by a list of all participating agencies. Where did we fall in the list? The last item which read "... and all other participating agencies". So yes, 911 dispatchers are VERY unappreciated even by their own employers. (I was PISSED.)

Well, find another job, then. I'm assuming that it's not just the t-shirt thing.

Most of my family seems to think that "public service" is a goal in itself, and I'm inclined to agree with them. Unfortunately, there are "externatilies," as economists would say.

Or, as Benjamin Franklin would say,

"Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest."

Kings, priests, county officials ... it's all the same thing. Not a single one of them cares about what you do. Ever.

Agreed.
As someone who until recently worked for one of the largest EMS radio system vendors (rhymes with Boat a Lola), I never really understood why we would spend roughly a staff week per line of code changed; I mean Im changing something trivial, why all the design, code review and all these tests; until I had time to tour a customer's trunked radio system server room with a Sr. systems engineer.

As I pointed to random infrastructure elements that made the radio network "just work. always", he would explain its primary, secondary and possibly tertiary fallback mode in case of power outage (and the UPS failed), network link (one of many, redundant) failed or random failure (each unit typically had at least one hot spare ready at all times). And some larger customers (major cities etc.) would have entire redundant systems in a hot spare facility located elsewhere.

So its a little amusing to read that while their radio system was still functioning, for lack of a UPS their dispatch consoles were blacked out.... how embarrassing.

Just to clarify... the orange button on the terminal server that I stupidly pressed was the internal circuit breaker. I learned that day that generally when a piece of equipment stops working and there's a smoky smell and the breaker pops, the last thing you should do is flip the breaker again. It pops for a very good reason.

A little postscript to add to the last part of the story is that after about 4 days of our heroic dispatchers doing their normal ordinary job while the county drowned around them (and the BATF stomped around looking important), the county bought and passed out "souvenir" t-shirts. On the back was the date of the event and something like "congrats for all of your hard work", followed by a list of all participating agencies. Where did we fall in the list? The last item which read "... and all other participating agencies". So yes, 911 dispatchers are VERY unappreciated even by their own employers. (I was PISSED.)

Well, find another job, then. I'm assuming that it's not just the t-shirt thing.

Most of my family seems to think that "public service" is a goal in itself, and I'm inclined to agree with them. Unfortunately, there are "externatilies," as economists would say.

Or, as Benjamin Franklin would say,

"Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest."

Kings, priests, county officials ... it's all the same thing. Not a single one of them cares about what you do. Ever.

She already found another job. At the beginning of the article, she said "... the dispatch center where I used to work."

jetcitywoman, I hope you are more appreciated at your new job. My hat's off to you for performing such a vital function.

In the time I have been at my current job, we have had rain in the server room, (a pipe in the (concrete) ceiling burst), we have had several air con failures, including two that involved more water, our comms mast (on the building i work in) has been struck by lighning several times, although never when i have been at work :( and we have had an equipment room flooded, the water was mostly under the floor but the electrics (420V) didn't like it and it did cause a fire, and nearly flooded again.
This all made me glad that I am a programmer and it wasn't me staying in until late to baby sit electricians/air con engineers and what ever.

Am I the only person that did a double take on "downtown businesses that got their power turned off in the afternoons"? California businesses are OK with the electric company shutting down their power in the middle of the afternoon on a regular basis?

Am I the only person that did a double take on "downtown businesses that got their power turned off in the afternoons"? California businesses are OK with the electric company shutting down their power in the middle of the afternoon on a regular basis?

CA, NY and most major metro regions do rotating brownouts during periods of heavy load. It's a preventative measure to try and avoid a blackout.

California has a weird energy regulation ploicy that causes the brown outs. Power generation is de-regulated and sold on an open energy market so that the price of electricity from generating plants can vary to demand levels in real time, but power distribution is still regulated, so utilities cannot charge the end customer more. During heavy load the price of electricity to the utility company spikes, but since they can't charge the end customer more money, delivering the electricity becomes immensely un-profitable, and they do rolling brown-outs to save money. At least that's how it was in the Enron days, maybe they've fixed it now.